Page:Four and Twenty Minds.djvu/54

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FOUR AND TWENTY MINDS

the city as though by magic, and draw their words not from books but from the heart.

This class of men has not yet been thoroughly described nor patiently studied, but it is larger than one would think. The pure, absolute types of the philosopher, the artist, the practical man, are very rare. A careful scrutiny will discover Utopians among business men, empiricists among philosophers, money-makers among poets.

All this is illustrated in the case of Berkeley. In him, indeed, if you scratch the philosopher, you will find the Christian apostle; if you scratch the man of religion, you will find the civic moralist; if you scratch the preacher, you will find the practical man and the artist; and after all these scratchings, you will not know which of all these persons is the true, the fundamental, the irreducible Berkeley.

The first period of his life (1685–1713) is devoted wholly to knowledge, and in particular, to philosophy. This is the period when he wins high honors at Trinity, when he studies mathematics and publishes his Arithmetic, when he and his friends, in a sort of philosophic academy which he had founded, discuss natural philosophy, Descartes, Locke, Spinoza, and Newton. But it is preëminently the period when enter triumphant exclamations and mysterious hints in his Commonplace Book—hasty notes concerning that